Bargain History

RECEIVED a flyer via Literary Review, I believe, offering a three-issue subscription to History Today for £5.
The first issue, July 2019, arrived this week and proved an entertaining, if at times frustrating, read.

Striking cover

There are main articles on apocalyptic thinking in the 1500s, women of the Ku Klux Klan, the 1943 Bengali famine, a consensus-inclined Cavalier, German armed operations in the Baltics in 1919, an "undecipherable" manuscript and Thatcherism.
I found every article interesting, but I am not sure what many of them are doing in a history magazine - if people from an event are still alive, I regard that as current affairs, not history.
And there is little attempt to investigate any of the subjects in depth - this is at best "History Lite," and seems to be aimed at a very general readership. This is somewhat confirmed by the magazine's crossword, which includes the clue: "9 _ de Milo, work of ancient Greek sculpture (5)".
Some of the English could be generously described as sloppy, eg "What book in your field should everyone read?" (my emphasis).
Then there is the "undecipherable" manuscript. Leaving aside that the word is more normally written as indecipherable, there is the fact that no manuscript is impossible to decipher any more than any castle is impregnable (despite the number of times a fortress is described as such in popular histories - often a paragraph before the said structure falls to enemy forces).
A sense of political correctness permeates much of the magazine, to comical effect at times, eg racist women in the Ku Klux Klan are described as "progressive" because they supported increased roles for women.
As well as three issues of the magazine, I am due to receive a copy of Mary Beard's SPQR: A History Of Ancient Rome. All in all, despite my criticisms, quite a bargain - as long as I cancel the direct debit before the annual follow-up charge of £84 kicks in.